How to Improve Your Visitor Registration Process in 2021

As we head further into 2021, the continuing pandemic and new variants emerging indicate that businesses need to improve upon their visitor registration processes with more than a temporary solution. Indeed, the new normal for office management has changed worldwide. Your visitor management experience will play a crucial role in how your customers, clients, as well as employees view and interact with your business each day.

For the general public’s health and safety, anyone with COVID-19 systems should not enter the premises. When considering these guidelines, one would ask how a company would be able to manage visitor interactions not only safely but effectively.

This article offers six recommendations on how businesses can implement practical visitor management strategies through ALICE Receptionist. The software provides a consistent experience through the ever-increasing changes we must adapt to in the reality of today’s world.

Read on to discover how to improve your visitor registration process in 2021. Learn how you can automate registration, help prevent entry to those suffering from COVID symptoms, in addition to notifying your staff when their visitors arrive without the need for in-person front desk interaction.

1.) Decrease Physical Contact

Social distancing measures are now a way of life for everyone. Avoiding unnecessary physical contact is key to reducing the spread of infection.

Refrain from welcoming visitors through physical contact like a handshake or even an elbow bump. If you still use pen and paper to record check-ins, make sure to disinfect them after each use. Disinfection also includes frequently touched surfaces as outlined in these guidelines. Door handles, worktops, handrails, etc., should be cleaned throughout the day. If you use a shield or barrier, ensure both sides get wiped after each visitor arrives.

Ideally, the check-in process should use little or no physical contact if possible. Virtual visitor registration software like ALICE Receptionist offers a hands-free kiosk solution that can replace the need for an in-person employee overseeing the front desk and allow employees to manage visitor entrances from a safe area. Motion detection activates when your guests arrive and welcomes them upon entry with an intuitive and easy to follow system for initiating communication.

2.) Implement an Automatic Visitor Registration Process

When managing your guests’ arrival in 2021, it is essential to consider registration options even before they visit your place of business in person. What is your lobby’s area size, and how many visitors can you efficiently and safely address within a specified time? These are all questions that a building or operations manager must consider to avoid potentially risky situations.

Guest scheduling ensures that evenly spaced visits reduce physical interaction and ensure that appropriate distancing is maintained by guests. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention encourages businesses to pre-book all guests. This process can occur via email but ideally should integrate into your workflow and calendar.

When your visitor arrives, they should experience a seamless check-in that takes as little time as possible. Automating this process and enabling guests to check themselves in is a crucial benefit.

ALICE’s Virtual Receptionist recognizes guests from the pre-booking stage, and the software lets visitors scan their ID like a driver’s license or a QR code on their phone. Once identified, the system could issue an adhesive badge or printout for further uses. A long-term benefit ALICE provides to this process is that the system is highly effective in streamlining group check-ins by removing the requirement of human oversight. As our world gradually becomes vaccinated and moves toward a time where larger gatherings are encouraged, your system is ready to accommodate.

3.) Customize Your Greetings

As guidelines continue to change weekly, your Receptionist needs to know how to greet visitors correctly and maintain up to date practices. Keeping personnel up to date with what feels like almost daily changes can get laborious or time-intensive.

ALICE Receptionist overcomes continuous staff training through custom greetings that inform visitors of your company’s specific guidelines. Pre-recorded videos are available to showcase your current policies and ensure a consistent message for every guest.

Instead of creating signage, manually updating displays, and manning an individual at the door to explain the status of your office, ALICE Receptionist can enable a ‘Not Accepting Visitors’ video to demonstrate that you cannot admit guests at this time due to the outbreak.

You can also include your organization’s documentation and update it as required. That means no re-training employees, and that your visitors are always kept up-to-date with the information they need at their fingertips.

4.) Offer a Pre-Check-In Questionnaire

A good check-in process should include a questionnaire to assess the risk of public health issues. A simple ‘yes or no’ response can help to spot potential health-related problems.

For example, do they have flu-like symptoms or a high temperature?

When answered, specific responses can indicate a risk that would inform visitors that their entry is not permitted at this time.

If an issue gets flagged, visitors have the option to contact the person they came to see through video conferencing and reschedule their meeting with them.

Alice Receptionist’s features a pre-check-in video questionnaire that can also inform visitors of your internal policies with a custom video.

5.) Provide a Custom Induction

As every business is unique, each will undoubtedly have a different initial interaction necessary for their guests and business needs. For example, multi-organization buildings have guests who arrive for different tenants. With ALICE, each individual company should have the ability to offer individualized induction documents based on their visitors’ requirements and the business’s needs.

Due to ALICE’s ability to identify employees as parts of different organizations, the system will always offer the correct induction experience based on their host organization’s needs. You’re able to upload your company’s branded PDFs and custom videos requiring guest interaction if you set that as a condition to entry. The software even remembers past visits and won’t display the induction process for return visitors until you choose to repeat it.

6.) Notify Your Employees More Efficiently

After a successful check-in, your host employee needs notification that their guest has arrived. Traditionally, receptionists would do this by phoning the host through the internal network. But what if they’re not at their desk? Or still in a meeting where they can’t take a call?

To help improve this part of the visitor check-in process, consider a more efficient approach.

ALICE can automatically notify hosts through email or a text message delivered straight to their mobile phone. That means no more awkward ‘he’s not at his desk’ replies and having to ring around the building to find them. Guests can also navigate the employee directory, select an employee to contact, and speak to them via an audio or two-way call on their phone or computer.

Improve Visitor Registration Process with ALICE Receptionist

Visitor registration remains a crucial component in keeping your employees and guests safe in 2021. However, we’ve learned that the best systems remove the need for contact yet maintain that human warmth to welcome your clients.

ALICE Receptionist’s visitor registration software provides a safe and efficient way to handle check-ins. It helps manage the front-desk systems that would typically require a live person to work. Our virtual kiosk solutions remove the problem of social distancing yet still provides full receptionist service for an exceptional experience.

Designed with remote flexibility in mind, ALICE lets visitors contact your employees directly. You can add custom induction documents and questionnaires to automate checking-in.